Blog

The early-bird rate closes in just three weeks for PNW conference on building human resilience for climate traumas. To see the PNW conference agenda, list of speakers and co-sponsors, and to register go to: http://www.theresourceinnovati ongroup.org/pnw-2017-conferenc e/

Pat Hays has written a devotional book that gives wonderful insight into the joys and struggles that parenting a child with emotional special needs presents. Her book, My Tears in His Bottle: prayers from the heart of a special needs’ mom , contains excerpts from her personal prayer journal as she worked through the last fifteen years of balancing her calling to be an adoptive parent with the roadblocks she encountered in her neighborhood, friendships, school district, marriage, and church...

Cultural humility — a respectful approach toward individuals of other cultures that continuously pushes one to challenge cultural biases — is an often-overlooked component of trauma-informed care . As a child clinical psychologist and mental health consultant, Allison Briscoe-Smith, PhD, leads trainings on cultural humility and trauma-informed care for organizations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Briscoe-Smith encourages those she works with to think of trauma-informed care and...

Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window. The restaurant is on “short shift” at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders – roughly one...

When San Diego County went looking for grant funds to help build a 300-bed jail for juveniles, officials argued that the 1950s-era Juvenile Hall on Meadowlark Lane was strained to the breaking point. “There is literally no more room at the inn,” the county warned in a grant application in 1999 seeking $36 million in construction funds for what would become, in 2004, the East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility. [For more of this story, written by Greg Moran, go to ...

Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, a Highland Hospital nurse in Oakland, and her husband this week ended their fight to remain in the U.S. after federal immigration authorities denied a last-ditch plea to stay. Maria, her husband Eusebio Sanchez, and their 12-year-old son, Jesus, boarded a flight at San Francisco International Airport for Mexico City less than an hour before a federal deportation order expired late Wednesday for the couple — leaving behind their three daughters, two of them adults and...

One day, when she was 14 and feeling ill, Daylesha Brown’s mother took her to a Baltimore hospital and did not return for her. Child Protective Services (CPS) placed her in a group home and she was forced to move to other homes for the next three years. “My mother, she pushed me away,” Brown, now 23, said softly. “I was always getting in trouble with my mother.” So last year when Brown discovered her daughter, Sa-Maji, had lead poisoning, a lingering problem in Baltimore where the rate of...

In November 2015, New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray launched ThriveNYC, a comprehensive mental health prevention and treatment program funded by the city to the tune of nearly $850 million. This is the program responsible for the ads and billboards found around New York City displaying messages like “Anxiety doesn’t define me,” and for training 250,000 mental health “First Aid” responders, to help people with mental illness and substance abuse disorders. The plan has been working well...

Seated at a kitchen table in a cramped apartment, Rosendo Gil asks the parents sitting across from him what they should do if their daughter catches a cold. Blas Lopez, 29, and his fiancée, Lluvia Padilla, 28, are quick with the answer: Check her temperature and call the doctor if she has a fever they can't control. "I'm very proud of both of you knowing what to do," Gil says, as 3-year-old Leilanie Lopez plays with a pretend kitchen nearby. Padilla says that's not a question they could have...

A review of Myrna Martin's short and direct pamphlet about the importance and approach to "co-creating secure attachment". The book is available in four languages and can be found at www.myrnamartin.net/books

ACEs, Adversity's Impact Interview: Windows into health care, part 1: Trauma and poverty Disadvantaged kids may be at higher risk for heart disease later in life Brain and Biology Brain injury in kids might lead to alcohol abuse Bullying Being bullied may dramatically affect sleep Back-to-school worries for parents? One in three very concerned bullying, cyberbullying Courts, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, and Probation Taycheedah Warden: Women's prison seeks to balance security,...

The news is heartbreaking and past trauma underpins so much of our fear and judgment. Wanted to post this for another hopeful angle. Healing is possible!